


Beautiful Fear.

by shedoessomewriting



Category: The Selection Series - Kiera Cass
Genre: All Time Favorites, Crying, F/M, Fluff, Fluffy, Maxerica - Freeform, OTP Feels, One Shot Collection, The One - Freeform, i love them, obsessed, would die for them
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-28
Updated: 2019-06-28
Packaged: 2020-05-28 09:18:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19391122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shedoessomewriting/pseuds/shedoessomewriting
Summary: A collection of one-shots about Maxon and America from Kiera Cass's extremely dreamy romance series, The Selection. Because they are my favorites, and I love them a whole lot.





	Beautiful Fear.

**Author's Note:**

> SO, the prompt I found on Tumblr for this was, "Imagine your OTP trying to figure out how the hell their child managed to get food on their forehead." And that's where it started. But I've read this series so many times that I know the characters so well that writing them is such a breeze, and so they took it in a wildly different, definitely more dramatic direction. Classic Maxon/America.
> 
> Hope you love it!

America and I were working in our office when a knock came on the door. America looked up from her papers, responded with a calm, “Come in,” and turned her face back towards her work, chewing on the end of her pencil while she thought. I smiled at her, and as I stood to cross to her, Mary entered the room, one twin on each hip.

She plunked Eadlyn down in my arms, Ahren down in America’s, who stood very suddenly, and huffed, “I don’t know what happened.” Without another word, she turned on her heel and left the room.

America started laughing. “Ahren’s got a slice of banana on his forehead.” I smiled, and looked down at my daughter, who had a banana slice in the exact same spot to match her twin brother’s.

“Look, darling, Eadlyn matches!” I remarked. “How did they get food on their foreheads?”

“Toddlers do things like that,” America shrugged, grabbing a tissue from her desk and wiping the banana off of Ahren’s forehead, kissing him where it had been.

“I didn’t do things like that,” I protested. She laughed.

“You never got any food on your face as a toddler?”

I paused, thinking. “No.”

“Maxon Calix Schreave,” she teased, “I distinctly remember you, at age twenty-three, spilling pie filling all down your chin at the last Christmas party, and I am supposed to believe that you never had food on your face when you could barely even chew?”

“Royal babies do not get food on their faces,” I joked.

“Clearly, you are wrong, and I have the proof,” she said, taking another tissue, wiping the food off of Eadlyn’s forehead, and then waving the tissue in my face.

“This is clearly their Singer side,” I laughed.

“Then it is their best side,” she fired back, setting Ahren down. He wandered over to the corner of the room where the twins had a toy box, on America’s insistence. She scooped Eadlyn out of my arms, but our tiny girl squirmed her way down as soon as she was with her mother.

America watched her go meet her brother, a sad look in her eyes. I came up behind her, wrapping my arm around her waist and pulling her close. She rested her head on my shoulder.

“Eadlyn… doesn’t like me.”

“America.”

“All I ever wanted was to be a mom. The best mom. The mom whose kids loved her so much, who wanted to be with her every waking moment, who didn’t fight their way to the ground the second she was holding them.”

“She’s a year and a half old. She’ll get there,” I encouraged. America matched my stance, and wrapped her arm around my back and waist.

“I’m scared she won’t.”

“How well do you get along with your mother?” I asked.

She laughed. “I love my mom.”

“That is not what I asked.”

“Point taken.”

“Just because Eadlyn and you don’t get along now doesn’t mean you won’t forever. And even if you _don’t_ get along when she’s nineteen and having her own Selection-”

“Wait, wait, wait. Stop. Eadlyn is not going through a Selection,” America said. I furrowed my eyebrows, confused.

“Of course she is. She’s taking the throne someday. It’s tradition.”

“It’s a gross, outdated, caste-based tradition,” she argued. “If we’re eliminating the castes, we have to take the Selection out with it.”

“We are the product of a Selection,” I said, kissing the top of her head.

“I’m aware. And trust me, that was the greatest luck of my life. I ended up with you, the most magnificent man, in here, the most beautiful cage,” she said, referencing our very first conversation, “ruling this, the country I love so very much. And look at us now - not just husband and wife, not even just King and Queen, but Dad and Mom, the two best titles we could ever get.” America shook her head. “I am so thankful for our Selection, because it gave me everything I knew I needed and everything I didn’t know about when I got here. But Eadlyn is not going to go through that.”

“I do not understand why not,” I said, breaking our intwined stance to look at her directly.

“Because she deserves the right to choose.”

“The Selection will give her a choice.”

America shook her head again, looking up at me with the utmost affection in her eyes, resting one hand on my cheek and the other on my shoulder. “The Selection will give her a choice out of thirty-five. And Eadlyn deserves to choose from the whole world, if that’s what she wants.”

“I suppose I am just lucky that my whole world was in that list of thirty-five.” I kissed the palm of her hand. “You taste like bananas.”

“That’s their fault,” she smiled, gesturing off at the twins. “Maxon, I want you to hear me. I am lucky that you, my light and my life, my Royal Husbandness,” she teased, “fell in love with me even when I didn’t want you to, and that you fell even more when I did. But the Selection, in the beginning, was a suffocating process. I can’t allow Eadlyn to feel any of the suffocation of the Selection, _unless_ she wants to, _unless_ it is necessary.”

“Unless it is necessary,” I agreed, smiling at her. She kissed me, then kicked off her heels and hiked up the hem of her gown to go play with Eadlyn and Ahren in their little corner of our office. She picked Ahren up with one hand and tickled him with the other until he was laughing so hard that he could hardly catch his breath, and then Eadlyn fell victim to Queen America’s viscious reign. I had never heard our daughter laugh so hard, and America was simply radiating joy because she had gotten Eadlyn to smile.

She may not have been the mom she thought she was going to be, but she was the perfect mom for the tiny prince and princess who filled our palace with laughter. America looked over at me, smiling, but I could see the faintest of tears in her eyes. She was always beautiful, but in that moment, America was simply radiant.


End file.
